Sam

[Kshama Sawant @cmkshama]

Three people have been murdered by ICE: Keith Porter, Renee Good, Alex Pretti.

Minneapolis has had hugely important protests. But labor leaders have shamefully refused to organize a general strike.

A general strike shuts down the bosses' profits. That's what's needed urgently.

[TR @t_riza92]

@cmkshama It would be incredible if she defeated Adam Smith

[Kshama Sawant @cmkshama]

The reason that the Democratic Party politicians have completely failed to fight against Trump is that they also represent the same agenda of Wall Street and war. Local politicians are no different, because they represent the same party and the same agenda. 

There are no Republicans on the Seattle City Council. During my decade as the lone independent socialist in City Hall, this meant that it was the Democratic Party politicians who opposed our movements every step of the way to protect the interests of big business and the corporate landlords.

By using my office to build working-class movements, my fellow revolutionary socialists and I were able to defeat big business and their political servants in the Democratic Party time and time again. We overcame their opposition and won historic victories like the nation’s highest minimum wage, the Amazon Tax, landmark renters’ rights, and important protections for immigrants and peaceful protestors. 

Many of our victories began with one lone vote in favor — mine — and eight opposed. Yet with a fighting strategy, including class struggle tactics like our public comment actions, our socialist leadership decisively shifted the balance of power in City Hall and delivered huge gains for the working class. 

We need that same fighting strategy nationally to defeat Trump’s and the Democrats’ attacks on immigrants and peaceful protestors, to end the genocide in Gaza, and to go on the offensive for national rent control and free healthcare for all paid for by taxing the rich. 

That is why I am running to become the first revolutionary socialist elected to U.S. Congress. If elected, I have pledged to turn my inauguration into a rally of 10,000 people in Washington, D.C., to launch mass movements to end US military aid to Israel, win free healthcare, and shut down ICE. 

We have a fighting chance at defeating 29-year warmongering Democratic Congressman Adam Smith, who voted to create ICE and is a faithful servant of U.S. imperialism. We have a chance to turn politics upside down in Washington D.C. and launch national mass movements. But we need you to get involved to help build a powerful national movement. Sign up today to donate and volunteer at https://t.co/sh3zyhgTI7.

[Sam @SamWhiteMusic]

✊🏼

[Kshama Sawant @cmkshama]

Join my campaign, @wrkrsstrikeback, and @SEASocialists for an emergency protest TOMORROW, Sat 1/10 at 12 pm (noon) at Columbia Park!

SHUT DOWN ICE & THE WAR MACHINE!

The Democratic Party and labor leadership have no strategy to stop the deadly and brutal attacks being carried out by Trump, ICE, and U.S. imperialism.

We need mass protests and civil disobedience, combined with mass strike action by public and private sector unions. In reality, union leaders should have called mass strike action many months ago, when immigrant activists Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk (both union members) were abducted and detained by ICE for protesting the genocide in Gaza. Mass strike action and civil disobedience could have stopped Trump’s deportation machine in its tracks.

But labor leaders did not do this, and instead they have allowed the situation to escalate where now both immigrants and U.S. citizens are being killed. Labor leaders are tied by a thousand threads to the same Democratic Party that has utterly and repeatedly betrayed working people.

Trump’s attacks are only possible because of the bipartisan policy of creating, funding, and expanding ICE over two decades, including by my opponent, warmongering genocidal Democrat @RepAdamSmith.

Shamefully, Minnesota’s Democratic Governor Tim Walz, rather than call for the kinds of mass protests that are needed, is preparing to send in the National Guard to Minneapolis to suppress the protests.

We need a united, independent fightback by socialists, rank-and-file union members, and working people.

We need a reckoning in the labor movement. We need to throw out the Democratic Party warmongers and build our movement to elect the first-ever revolutionary socialist to the U.S. Congress.

RSVP now to join my campaign, Workers Strike Back, and Seattle Revolutionary Socialists TOMORROW, Saturday, 1/10 @ 12 pm (noon) at Columbia Park: https://t.co/gnGO2zBM7I

[Kshama Sawant @cmkshama]

Two days ago, the U.S. House voted for the annual military funding bill. It is a horrific nearly trillion dollars for more weapons and bloodshed.

My opponent Democrat Adam Smith has been a cheerleader for this bill. Democrats like him are proud of their bipartisan agreement with Trump and the Republicans.

Join me LIVE today, 12/12, at 3 pm PT / 6 pm ET for the latest report on this bill and how working people can build militant movements to end the forever wars by the Democrats and Republicans.

Watch live on

@cmkshama socials

OR

the @onstrikeshow YouTube channel at
https://t.co/qWhOnHIEzZ

Join my campaign at https://t.co/sh3zyhgTI7 and help us elect the first revolutionary socialist to the U.S. Congress!

[Kshama Sawant @cmkshama]

Trump and the Republicans are threatening war and regime change in Venezuela. The Democrats are limiting their objections to saying Trump needs “Congressional approval,” at the same time they add fuel to the fire by supporting Trump’s thinly veiled pretext for war.

War, bloodshed, and imperialism are a bipartisan agenda of both parties of the billionaires.

This assault on Venezuela is incredibly dangerous.

Join me LIVE today, 12/05, at 4 pm PT / 7 pm ET for an independent socialist analysis and a strategy to fight back!

Watch live on @cmkshama socials OR

on @onstrikeshow YouTube at https://t.co/lRk8DFG7qA

Join my campaign at https://t.co/sh3zyhgTI7 and help us elect the first revolutionary socialist to the U.S. Congress!

[Eleanor Steinhagen @ElleSteinhagen]

@TaylorLorenz I read your article on the dark money group funding Democratic Party influencers. An interview of Kshama Sawant would be a good addition to your work. @cmkshama has taken on the Seattle & WA State Democrats and gone to war against big business, winning a long list of unparalleled victories for working people — the first major $15 min wage (now $20.76, increasing annually with inflation), the Amazon Tax, and historic renters rights to name a few.

She’s running against pro-genocide Democrat Adam Smith and her first demand is ending all U.S. military aid to Israel. She’s also calling for free healthcare for all by taxing the rich, stopping the deportations, and national rent control.

Smith is the ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee. He has voted for 10s of billions of dollars for Israel’s genocide, and has vote to defund UN food aid to Gaza. He voted for the Iraq war, and he voted to create ICE.

Smith’s biggest donor last year was AIPAC, and he’s getting maxed out donations from the same weaponized tech companies you report on: Palantir & co-founders Alexander Karp & Joe Lonsdale; Anduril & co-founders Matthew Grimm & Brian Schimpf; General Atomics & co-owners, pro-Trump billionaire brothers Neal & Linden Blue… The list goes on.

Will you interview Kshama who is taking on these genocide-profiteering companies and challenging Adam Smith?

[B L A K E L E Y™℠©® LLC @_iamblakeley]

AOC @AOC tells Axios it’s “not the right time” for House “leader” Hakeem Jeffries to be primaried.

They tell you to “fight the oligarchy” and then when someone goes “okay, I will”, they’re like “not like that! It’s not the right time!”

[Kshama Sawant @cmkshama]

Democrats are a dumpster fire of a party.

Could it be any more obvious that they don’t give a damn about working and poor people? They’re ruthless representatives of the wealthy and the bosses as much as the Republicans are.

They carried out a government shutdown as a purely performative gesture, claiming that they were standing up for Affordable Care Act subsidies and the restoration of Medicaid funding.

But they held the shutdown just long enough for the 2025 elections to get done. Then they picked a group of Senators who are either retiring or are not up for re-election in 2026 to be the bad guys.

Tens of millions of poor people went through absolute heartache for the basic food assistance they lost during the shutdown. TSA workers went six weeks without pay, many of them facing evictions because they were unable to pay their rent.

The Democratic Party had multiple chances to make the ACA tax credits permanent when they had Biden in the White House and a majority in both the House and the Senate. They could have voted in Medicare for All, but they represent the billionaires and multimillionaires, so of course, they did not.

The Democratic Party is utterly rotten. Working people need a new party of our own. A party whose leaders fight against the bosses and their political goons.

I am running as an independent revolutionary socialist against genocidal billionaire-backed Democrat Adam Smith. Winning our election would be nothing short of a political earthquake in D.C. politics and a huge step towards a new party for workers.

My campaign is fighting for free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich, national rent control, and a national $25/hour minimum wage. We are fighting for an end the genocide in Gaza, for a permanent end to all U.S. military aid to Israel, and to the brutal occupation of Palestinian lands.

[JA @JA30275485]

@cmkshama 100% from Canada. It took a 3rd party in Canada, the socialist NDP (New Democratic Party) to get universal health care and livable pensions for seniors against everything the other 2 parties, Liberals and Conservatives, could throw at them.

[Em 🏳️‍⚧️✊ @socialistem]

WTF, @waltermasterson?

I was planning to attend this show. Not anymore.

Someone clearly got a call from the “progressive” Democratic establishment in Seattle (like @RepJayapal). No independent socialists allowed!

How shameful.

Why are you gatekeeping for the Democratic Party?

[B L A K E L E Y™℠©® LLC @_iamblakeley]

I like Walter Masterson so this is very disappointing to see. The right doesn’t gatekeep the way the progressive and libs do and this is why this country keeps moving right.

Liberals/progressives should stop being so hostile to the left like you guys are often nicer to Republicans.

[D Wolfgang Wallace @SpaceAgedRobot]

Shameful to see people with platforms like @waltermasterson use them to gatekeep just like the politicians they run cover for. There is a media blackout around Sawant’s campaign, Masterson could have been a part of the solution but instead has balked.

[Sam @SamWhiteMusic]

Give the people what they want, @waltermasterson. It would go viral and spark discussion on how we end the genocide and win free healthcare by taxing the rich. @cmkshama’s got jokes, too.

But if that’s too much civil discourse for you and @RepJayapal, then I’d like a refund.

[Sam @SamWhiteMusic]

After @waltermasterson’s Mamdani interview, I was really looking forward to @cmkshama appearing alongside @RepJayapal.

Kshama’s opponent @RepAdamSmith says we don’t want “civil discourse” — but it’s Dems like him and Jayapal who block independent socialists from the mic.

[Kshama Sawant @cmkshama]

At least 20 supporters of my Congressional campaign already bought tickets to @waltermasterson's show tomorrow on the basis that I was going to be in the show. These are all working people who don't have a lot of spare cash to buy expensive show tickets. One supporter told us that she had gone to great lengths to arrange childcare so she could attend the show.

Masterson’s team says they will refund these tickets. That’s good. But in reality, it’s the bare minimum they should do given this act of political cowardice on their part.

In their email, they didn’t deny their political differences but made the excuse that they were “going in a different direction creatively.” But this has nothing to do with “creative” direction. It is about their decision not to get on the wrong side of Democratic Party “progressives”, whom Masterson regularly props up on his shows.

I encourage all of my supporters who have already purchased tickets to contact Masterson’s team to make sure they get a refund, and also to ask why they are acting as gatekeepers to keep an independent socialist from appearing on their show. I’d also encourage everyone to tag Masterson here on social media and do the same.

To any media who would like to set the opposite example to the Democratic Party gatekeepers: I encourage you to reach out to my campaign at [email protected].

This just shows again why we need to build a powerful movement to defeat the genocidal Democratic and Republican Parties. Nothing working people win is ever handed to us — we have to wrest it from the hands of the billionaires and their many servants.

[Sam @SamWhiteMusic]

@Chameleon2699 @cmkshama You can watch & share the livestream or join an in-person watch party in 10+ states!! This is a nationwide campaign. https://t.co/uViLbrTBXs

[Justin Smeltzer @JustinSmeltzer]

As a @UAW member I agree with @cmkshama we should immediately be planning coordinated strike actions in the US to shut down the bosses profits in order to end the genocide in gaza. Leaders like @ShawnFainUAW should be calling for this right now incoordination with Italian workers

[Kshama Sawant @cmkshama]

Solidarity with @GretaThunberg and the more than 90 other activists who have been detained by the Israeli military in an attack against their courageous effort to break Israel's genocidal blockade and deliver crucial food and medical aid to Gaza.

So far, this assault on peaceful activists has been met with deafening silence from Democratic Party politicians like @BernieSanders, @AOC, and @PramilaJayapal.

The Democratic Party had no problem praising Greta when they thought she was "safe" for them and could be molded into yet another political gatekeeper. Even my pro-genocide opponent @RepAdamSmith congratulated Greta in 2019 when she was selected as @TIME Person of the Year, saying, "Thank you for all that you do!"

Now, even self-described progressive Democratic Party politicians have turned their backs on Greta the MOMENT she started speaking out against the genocide in Gaza, which they are complicit in.

These same Democratic politicians were also silent when Chris Smalls (@Shut_downAmazon) was detained and beaten by the Israeli military in July.

What's happening in Gaza is the holocaust of the 21st century. More than half a million are now estimated to have been killed, and more than 400 are confirmed dead from forced starvation. Democrats like Adam Smith voted to ban U.S. funding for United Nations food aid for Gaza AFTER they knew about the catastrophic mass starvation.

The attack on Greta and other flotilla activists is part of a widespread attack on antiwar protesters. My husband and our campaign’s political director, @CalvinPriest, was also arrested for protesting the genocide at a public town hall hosted by Adam Smith in July, and is currently being slandered in the media by Adam Smith, who labeled antiwar protesters "leftwing fascists" and called for their arrest.

Stopping this genocide will require protests on a much larger scale, along with mass strike action and mass peaceful civil disobedience. We need actions like we’re seeing in Italy, where a general strike has been called Friday in solidarity with Greta and the other arrested activists, and where dockworkers have refused to load military cargo headed for Israel.

Union leaders in the U.S. need to call similar actions, including a general strike. Unfortunately, most top union leaders are tied at the hip to the Democratic Party and, in some cases, the Republican Party.

We need new, fighting leaders who will break from these two genocidal parties and call mass protests and strike action to stop the attacks on Palestinians, immigrants, antiwar protesters, workers, and oppressed people everywhere, and fight to win real victories for working people.

This is also why our campaign to defeat genocidal Democrat Adam Smith and elect the first-ever revolutionary socialist to the U.S. Congress is such a crucial part of the antiwar movement. I'm fighting to end all U.S. military funding to the Israeli state and to win free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich.

[Oscar Haney @sOscarHaney]

I have lived in Seattle nearly my whole life and didn’t know who Kshama was or how the $20.76/hr was won until this year, but it is clear why:

The ruling class don’t want this example to reach the masses because it shows the power of challenging the establishment with movements.

[Sam @SamWhiteMusic]

A must-read that cuts through the sea of terrible and dangerous takes.

[Kshama Sawant @cmkshama]

The killing of Charlie Kirk represents a dangerous moment in U.S. history.

The Trump administration and right-wing organizations are going all out to capitalize on Kirk’s assassination to attack working-class movements and the left. Already, we are seeing firings and political targeting of individuals just for voicing their views, including over a dozen teachers and professors who have been suspended or fired. The Trump administration is also gearing up to use Kirk’s killing as a pretext to double down on attacks against trans people.

Working people urgently need to fight back.

We also must unambiguously reject the methods of terror on display in the killing of Kirk. Such methods are a dead end for working-class movements.

Throughout history, the way working people have won change has been through powerful mass movements against the capitalist class and their representatives, mass strike action to shut down the profit machine of the bosses, fighting to take the major corporations into democratic public ownership, and through building our own political parties that will fight for our needs. The most fundamental change comes through revolution. Karl Marx was right.

A revolution is an act of the millions, not of frustrated individuals or small groups. It is the product of mass struggles, organized around concrete demands and a fighting strategy, that can successfully take the reins of society away from the billionaires and into the hands of the working class, to create a society that is democratically run in the common interest. Capitalism is a system that cannot be reformed. Neither the billionaires and multimillionaires who currently own the vast resources and wealth, nor their political spokespeople such as the Democratic and Republican Parties in the United States, will ever willingly agree to transforming society in the way that’s urgently needed. Only a socialist world, built on international working-class solidarity, where the economy is under democratic workers’ control and planned rationally and sustainably, can ensure a real future for humanity. To win such a world, the violent, bankrupt system of capitalism must be eliminated.

My organization, Revolutionary Workers, and I reject the methods of terror used against Kirk, because OUR methods are mass movements and revolution.

We also completely reject and condemn the waves of hypocrisy coming from the halls of power.

Both Republican and Democratic politicians, including my opponent Democratic Congressman Adam Smith, have loudly spoken against “political violence” in response to Kirk’s killing, yet they are themselves fully complicit in mass political violence, state terrorism, and the holocaust being carried out in Gaza.

Democrats and Republicans, including Adam Smith, have repeatedly voted for tens of billions in military aid for the genocide in Gaza, to block United Nations food aid for Palestinians, for the ongoing brutal occupation of Palestinian lands, for war after bloody war on multiple continents, and for savage attacks on the living standards of American working people. The Gaza genocide has, by some scientific estimates including by the medical journal The Lancet, already taken well over half a million Palestinian lives. Both Democrats and Republicans are still unconditionally backing this genocide, even in the face of decisive evidence of the mass starvation taking place and the Israeli state’s openly proclaimed ethnic cleansing objective.

Now, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, these same genocidal politicians would have us think that they believe every life is precious. Some Democratic politicians say we must “honor” Charlie Kirk’s legacy. California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom tells us “The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work.” Working people must completely reject this shameful attempt to whitewash Charlie Kirk’s legacy. Kirk, and the right-wing movement he helped lead, have caused immense human damage. Far from honoring Kirk’s work, we need to build powerful working-class movements against the attempts to use Kirk’s death to escalate those horrors.

Kirk was a longtime supporter of the brutal occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, Israeli apartheid and state terrorism, and the genocide in Gaza. He was a leader in the anti-trans assault, a misogynist and antagonist toward women’s rights, and a cheerleader for mass deportations and other vicious attacks on the working class. He was a dedicated fighter for Donald Trump and his trillion-dollar assault on Medicaid and Medicare, which will claim many thousands of lives.

Calling for the continuation of Kirk’s work only reveals once again that Newsom and the Democratic Party have infinitely more in common with the Kirks of the world than they do with working-class and oppressed people.

When was the last time Democratic politicians showed any such concern for the Palestinian people, whose killings they continue to back and whose blood they have on their hands? Where is the honoring of the many millions of ordinary working and poor people killed by U.S. imperialism in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and countless other countries, with the full support of both warmongering parties?

When leaders like Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Rosa Luxemburg, and Martin Luther King Jr. were brutally murdered, capitalist politicians didn’t mourn. Some of them celebrated. Some of these killings are known to have been carried out by capitalist states.

Even more egregious than Newsom’s statements was the recent vote by Congressional Democrats for the so-called Charlie Kirk remembrance day resolution. The resolution praises Kirk as a “champion of free speech” and lauds him for supposedly “promoting principles of liberty and democracy across the United States”. Every single Democratic Senator, and 95 House Democrats including Adam Smith, voted in favor of this resolution.

At the same time, this same Democratic Party is also trying to pose as standard bearer for free speech, putting forward a free speech bill that is mostly devoid of any substantive provisions in defense of free speech and also a purely performative gesture in a Republican-controlled Congress. The first 15 of the nearly 24 months of the Gaza genocide happened under Democratic President Biden and the leadership of Congressional Democrats. Any “free speech” bill from the Democratic Party is especially hypocritical in the wake of the ferocious attacks on peaceful antiwar activists last year. In April of last year, Adam Smith called antiwar activists “left-wing fascists”and demanded they be arrested. Both Biden and the Congressional Democrats, and Democratic administrations in cities and states including Newsom, oversaw the worst police crackdown on protest movements in the half century since the Vietnam War era. By the summer of last year, over 3,500 antiwar protesters had been arrested.

Some on the left underestimate the dangers of a crackdown on our movements in the wake of Kirk’s killing because they say we’re already facing one and it can’t get worse. This is woefully mistaken. The current level of repression, as horrific as it is, is far from the level of the Red Scare of the 1920s, in which countless socialists and labor organizers were murdered, or the assassinations of Black Panthers and Civil Rights leaders in the 1960s and 1970s, or the many horrific examples internationally like the mass killings in Chile following the U.S.-led coup.

But while recognizing the real danger, the solution is not to go on the defensive any more than it is to “honor” the legacy of Charlie Kirk. We need to do the opposite: go on the offensive to build militant mass movements to politically fight for the interests of working people and the oppressed. To fight for an end to the genocide in Gaza and all U.S. military aid to Israel. To fight for free healthcare for all funded by taxing the rich. And for an end to the deportations and to shut down ICE and the detention centers. To be successful, working people need to get far better organized.

We need to become the real left POLITICAL threat that Trump and the right wing say we are.

To do so we need to build broad working-class unity — unity across race, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion. Unity which includes working people who agree with what we are fighting for, regardless of whether they have previously voted Republican, Democratic or independent, or whether they are native-born or immigrant. We need to build this unity by fighting for our common interests as working people AGAINST the billionaires and their bankrupt system of capitalism, which is based on theft, brutal violence, and the exploitation of all of us.

To defeat the right wing and the billionaires, and to achieve anything at all, working people and unions need to sever all ties with both the Democratic and Republican Parties. Trump and the Republicans are deeply anti-worker and anti-poor, and so is the Democratic Party. Wars and attacks on working people have always been a bipartisan project. The rank and file of the labor movement need to organize for a different course than the labor leadership, who have long been tied at the hip to the anti-worker Democratic Party and are now shamefully making overtures to Trump and the Republicans as well. Teamster President Sean O’Brien in particular has been cozying up to Trump. Teamster leaders in Ohio recently endorsed right-wing political figure Vivek Ramaswamy. United Auto Workers President Sean Fain declared himself ready to work with Trump on his disastrous tariffs project, after having uncritically cheered Kamala Harris in last year’s election. All of this stands in stark contrast to mass consciousness, with the majority of American working people disgusted at both the Democratic and Republican Parties.

Working people cannot afford false ideas of unity with either of these anti-worker, warmongering parties. Most importantly, it’s illusions in the possibility of reforming the Democratic Party that are holding back the growth of left movements and have enabled the right wing to grow and become increasingly dangerous. Working people need to build independent movements and independent campaigns and prepare the ground for a new party. There is mass support for almost every demand we are fighting for, and both the Democratic Party or Republican Party are irreconcilably opposed to all of them. Working people are desperate for an independent fight. I urge working people to join Workers Strike Back to help build a movement against both parties of genocide and capitalism.

https://t.co/WJAF9Ai1xL